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Oct 18, 2012

The Seattle-based Black Orchid Collective has a great post on developing strategies for combating both privatized repression and insurgent fascism. The piece is intended to prompt discussion and touches on a lot of issues and resources: police outsourcing repression to private security forces, gangs, and far rightists; Don Hamerquist on the hollowing out of states; ruling-class theorist John Robb on open source warfare and counterinsurgency; the book Confronting Fascism; the Sojourner Truth Organization on anti-fascist strategies; and Trotsky's strategy of a united front against Nazism.

A united front means "a tactical alliance of mutual protection that operates at the street level, not the electoral level" in which "each group maintains its politics [and] the radicals don't subordinate or hide ours." In applying this, as the BOC's post emphasizes, it's important to avoid sliding into a popular front approach (in which radicals are instructed to tone down or abandon their politics to unite with liberals). It's also important

"to account for how some of the fascists are an insurgent right-wing
movement from below. They are competing with the Left and the
anarchists to express the anger that many people feel against the
capitalist system. Any force that gets too close with electoral
reformism could get discredited as this reformism leads to new rounds of
austerity and capitalist crisis. This could happen to Syriza too [the largest socialist party in Greece]. All
the other socialist electoral parties have ended up imposing austerity
and subordination to imperialism and global capital. If Leftists get
too close to these parties and do not criticize them, the fascists can
say 'look, the Left failed to fight austerity, we are the only force
left capable of doing it, so side with us'."